Building Slack Bots

Sending a direct message

A direct message (DM) channel is a channel that only operates between two users. By design, it cannot have more or less than two users and is meant for private communication. Sending a DM is remarkably similar to sending a message to a channel, as the dm object is almost identical to the channel object.

Consider the following snippet:

slack.on(RTM_EVENTS.MESSAGE, (message) => { let user = slack.dataStore.getUserById(message.user) if (user && user.is_bot) { return; } let channel = slack.dataStore.getChannelGroupOrDMById(message.channel); if (message.text) { let msg = message.text.toLowerCase(); if (/uptime/g.test(msg)) { let dm = slack.dataStore.getDMByName(user.name); let uptime = process.uptime(); // get the uptime in ...